Off topic - furniture distruction

[dlcw]

Does anyone know of some pictures of furniture that has torn itself apart because the the piece was built without wood movement taken into account. Like gluing up a cross grain joint or gluing in a panel on a 5-piece door, etc.....

I've tried searching with Google but nothing I enters returns anything.

I am starting volunteer teaching next week at my local highschool wood shop classes and I wanted to educate kids in the necessities of accounting for wood movement in their projects and ways to address the issue.

[Ajcoholic]

Darn, I just repaired and refinished a very large, solid red oak table that was built by another local shop (now out of business), but I didnt take any before pics.

The fellow glued on two large bread board ends, onto the top, which was 48" wide and 1 1/2" thick. The ends were tongue and grooved and glued the entire length/width.

There was 3 or 4 very large cracks that went through the entire thickness, after this past winter - which was long and very dry. I had to cut the ends off, rip out the cracks and re-glue up the top with some new wood to make up the difference and then used loose tenons - just glued in the center to allow the top to expand and contract in the future.

Too bad I didnt take a before picture. It was the classic "dont glue wood in opposing directions" and what happens when you break that rule...

I remember a few solid wood RP doors I saw that had the panel glued in... man, what a mess!

AJC

[Tim Lucas]

You can make a stress broken board fairly quick in the oven - or have students glue across grain then dry in oven to demonstrate the brake.:cool:

[scottp55]

Just a few pics of when my carpenters forgot grain and where the piece would be when doing stuff. Basically stuff to do in between houses and greenhouses(2 crews), not things they would normally do. 1 chair not sure of origin, but poor design and fixed twice poorly before Mom asked me to try. Wish I had a Domino.:)
Not exactly what you're looking for, Andrews would have been better. Just stuff in my house I see everyday and annoys me. A better example is my double pocket doors (3X8'X1.5") that they built in December and thought 1/8" clearance was sufficient for the side trim(Of course they bow a 1/4" in the summer and besides sticking like crazy--trim has left a "Line" 4' up) but I couldn't get a good pic.

[shilala]

An old buddy of mine built cabinet/bookshelves in his whole living room.
He glued all the door panels into all the rails/stiles. Every single panel cracked, split, came loose, shrunk, and slopped around.
An incredible amount of work was rendered stupid looking for just a little lack of know-how. I felt awful for him.

Here ya go. (https://www.google.com/search?q=split+door+panels&safe=off&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=QrARVPvlE5WmyATN_YDYCA&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1920&bih=947#safe=off&tbm=isch&q=cracked+split+cabinet+door+panels&imgdii=_)
Lots of pics there of cracked and split cabinets, cabinet panels and panel movement from just mildly improper construction.

[dlcw]

Thanks everyone.

I think these pictures will get the point across.

I like the idea of having the students glue up a cross grain experiment and let it sit for the semester and see what happens. Just use some scrap pine they have laying around.

[bleeth]

My sister used to live in North Carolina near Asheville and had an antique trestle dining table built breadboard (I think Oak). The difference in the width of the long stretches between winter and summer was over an inch. It only lined up with the ends for a couple months of the year.

[Tom Bachman]

I use the example of the maple gym floors. Many years ago when we were doing some remodeling/add ons here at school, the construction company had torn off the entry to the gym (to build a bigger better one). They just covered the doorway into the gym with plywood. We had a blowing snow over a weekend and when they came back on Monday, they found the middle of the gym floor buckled and raised about 30". That was quite a sight. After lots of sawing between the boards they got it back down. To this day you can go in there and look at the floor and see where they cut, because as the wood dried out it left big gaps (where they cut) and have subsequently filled. This was 35 years ago that this happened.

I then show them how they tried to account for the movement with the wide aluminum plates that cover the floor where it stops.

[Tom Bachman]

I also talk about a former student who made a chest (cedar type, but made of red oak), with three raised panels in the front. When they glued it up they glued the panels in, despite my heeds of warning, because their father was a "carpenter" and he told them to glue them in and ignore what I told them. I told the student, that the chest would tear itself apart. It might be next week, next month, next year, or sometime in the future, but it would happen. Her father kept reminding me every time I saw him that everything was good and that it was going to be in a house where it was heated and air conditioned so it would not do that. About 6 years later he calls me to ask how he could fix the cracks in the panels and that the frame was breaking apart in a couple locations, and couldn't figure out "Why" it was doing so.

All I could tell him was "I told you so".

[Burkhardt]

Some 25 years ago I built a large dining table using a ready purchased sheet of maybe 40" x 70" x 2" butcher block glued end grain pine. Quite expensive but looked the business...
Since I needed the table even a little bigger I put a frame around it with lengthwise grain. Don't ask me how I could be that dumb because I knew about the different expansion and contraction. But at that point it just did not occur to me that there would be that much.

Sure enough the table top center developed huge cracks within days, even before I could put the finish on (no, I was not patient enough to let acclimatize, either). I kind of salvaged the table by routing a bunch of grooves in the underside and embedding a number of M10 threaded rods, steel end plates with nuts in both directions and that way forced the frame to compress the end grain center. Then I filled the grooves with epoxy to keep in place. Not very elegant but fortunately not visible from above. The table weighed over 200 pounds and had a fancy mechanism to fold up against the wall and out of the way.